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Originally Posted by Kareeser
Zero-writing is nearly foolproof, right?
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Supposedly, but who knows? It's *supposed* to fill every bit on the hard drive with a zero, which would seem to effectively wipe it clean. I've heard stories of people zero-writing a hard drive and still being able to recover some things though too. I don't know if those are rumors only or if there's some truth to them.
I bought a used hard drive once for my old Pentium 1, and apparently it still had some info on it as well. The guy I bought it from got it for me off of eBay (I didn't have internet at the time) and he told me that it had been thoroughly wiped by the previous owner and that he made sure of it as well. I admit, it *looked* clean.....wasn't anything on it when I installed my OS to it. But after a couple months of using it, I went to some online store, and when the page loaded it said "Welcome back, Scott!"
Needless to say, my name isn't Scott. It had his first and last name and his city/state info on that page and his purchasing history of things he had bought on another page (bought a 25" tv and a vcr from them
). I don't know how that cookie or whatever it was got through the wipe untouched, but apparently it was still on there......somewhere. Since witnessing that firsthand, I decided I was never going to sell one of my used hard drives to anyone. Last one I had got the platters taken out of it to make a nifty wind chime and my brother's using the magnets to hold workorder pages on his toolbox at his job.